The present invention relates to a route planning system for agricultural working machines.
The related art makes known a large number of generic route planning systems which are used to record driving routes for a vehicle to be driven over a territory to be worked, and the automatic implementation of previously programmed driving routes by the aforementioned vehicle. For example, publication DE 43 42 171 describes the recording of routes that the soil-working machine has covered on a territory to be worked for a soil-working process which uses GPS-based position data. The driving route data from the agricultural working machine determined in this manner are then converted—depending on the design of the data processing device—in the particular agricultural working machine or in a central arithmetic unit into driving route data, which can then be displayed on-line or stored in a retrievable manner. Systems of this type have the disadvantage, in particular, that the vehicle must first work a certain driving route before it is contained—in a retrievable manner—in the memory unit, and, optionally, before it is available as a basic data record used to generate driving routes to be worked in the future.
A route-planning method which is typically used today in combination with “automatic” track-following systems is disclosed, e.g., in U.S. Pat. No. 6,236,924. Since a territory to be worked is initially selected in a software-supported manner using distinct reference points and this selected territory is then divided into defined driving routes using various optimization criteria, a predefined route plan can be provided to the vehicle after the vehicle is automatically driven over the territory to be worked. Systems of this type also have the disadvantage that distinct reference points must first be determined for the territory to be selected and, to do this, it is necessary to access previously-generated data or to first drive the particular vehicle around the territory to be selected. While, in terms of accessing previously-generated data, one is limited to the information content of this data, driving the particular vehicle directly over the territory to be worked represents a great deal of preparatory effort which must be expended to implement route planning.